Truth in Fiction

A comment on this post from Rationally Speaking

J'C: "Humans are story telling creatures. We learn about living in our society "Around the campfire" from fables and stories all of which are fictional. A powerful fictional story works not because of the characters or what happens to them but because the social structures they are embedded in provide meaningful social information whether we agree with it or not. Several of the novels mentioned above, "Gone With the Wind," "Grapes of Wrath," "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," among many others all provided depictions of a social ethic which whether we agreed with it or not, was part of the social fabric in which we live or could live.

Probably the best philosophy course I took was entitled "Philosophy from Literature." Starting with Homer, and stopping off every few hundred years until we reached James Joyce's Ulysses. The basic premise of the course was what can you learn about your society from the literature of various past societies?"

Fiction allows the author or anonymous authors of most of the fiction and fables from which we derive our mores to explore those mores in ways that direct exposition cannot. The characters can and do react in "unacceptable" ways that people can learn from. Note I am not excluding the religious fictions which guide religious mores.

I have learned almost everything I know about social mores from fiction. I read almost nothing else. I would much rather read a very smart person telling a good story embedded in a well thought out social structure than an equally smart sociologist trying to figure out a social structure from observation of reality. The sociologist is extremely limited by having to describe and reason from existing social structures, and trying to guess why some are dysfunctional, and some seem to work. The very smart novelist, playwright or poet simply plops his characters into a social structure that is close enough to a real structure to be recognizable, and show how the fictional characters react to it. The writer is not limited to reality but can explore variations on reality to see how the fictional characters might respond to the challenges presented by that variation.

June 19, 2010 12:20 AM